Wheeling It: Making memories and getting rid of them

I’ve been thinking a lot about memories recently. What makes a memory, how we recall them and (very pertinent to what we’re doing right now) how we manage them going forward. You see when we went on the road over 6 years ago we made a mistake, or perhaps it would be more appropriate to say we made a miss-calculation. We got a 10′ x 15′ storage and packed it to the brim with everything we thought we wanted to keep.

We had a lot of memories, a lot of stuff that meant something to us, for whatever reason. It’s not that we didn’t downsize when we went RVing. We really did get rid of a ton of stuff! But we also kept a bunch -> old photographs, letters, key pieces of furniture, special knick-knacks. The last remnants of our “old life” which we felt we wanted to hang onto.

Our reason for doing this wasn’t completely moronic either. We really didn’t think we’d be on the road that long! Our plan was to RV for a year, maybe two and then we’d find our “perfect” place and settle down again. Why get rid of a lifetime of stuff when you’re going to need it again within a few years? Especially when you’ve saved and collected such nice stuff over so many years? Of course that plan flew out the window as soon as we passed the 2-year mark, especially since (by then) we knew we didn’t want to settle down anytime soon.